I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

We've Pretty Much Solved The Metals Recycling Problem, Now For The Plastics

I find myself in full agreement with my colleague, Adam Ozimek, here on the subject of reycling. He’s absolutely correct in that it is profits that drive the industry, not good intentions. As he describes the economics of the situation it is the ability of people to use the outputs of the recycling process at a profit that drives whether recycling itself is a worthwhile activity. That, plus whether the recycling activity itself is profitable in itself. It’s the two combining, is it worth extracting the material from the waste stream for the price we can get for it, plus will someone be able to use it profitably once we have, that is the driver of recycling.

What I’ll add here to the economics that Ozimek describes is the personal knowledge of the industry itself. As an example, I did once recycle 40 tonnes of old Soviet nuclear scrap into car wheels. That this was profitable to all concerned is why it happened. In detail the alloy that is made to use the tubes to hold the uranium in a reactor is made of a zirconium/niobium alloy (the western world uses Zr/Sn, the Soviet Zr/Nb). These tubes are made to a standard length but the floor of a reactor is often curved. Therefore some part of the tube needs to be cut off before being filled with uranium in order to fit into the reactor. This leads to there being an ever rising stock of these tube offcuts.

It’s not worth trying to extract the Nb from the Zr so as to be able to recycle this scrap back into the nuclear tube production cycle. And we never do use mixed scrap here: all nuclear materials are, for safety reasons, made from pure materials to make the specific alloys required. However, in almost all of the uses of zirconium out there in the general economy we want material that is free of niobium: it’s regarded as a “poison” in Zr. This doesn’t mean that it’s “poisonous”, it’s a technical word meaning that we don’t want our supply of scrap Zr to have Nb in it, in the same way that we don’t want copper in our scrap steel.

So we can’t use this scrap Zr/Nb by feeding it back into factories that make Zr for other purposes, nor can we feed it back into the nuclear industry itself. However, what a colleague and I noted is that the Nb level is quite low: these Soviet alloys have either 1.1% or 2.5% Nb in the Zr. And there is a use for Zr where we only use 1% or so Zr in the final product. This is in making secondary aluminium alloys (ie, alloys made from aluminium scrap) one use of which is to make those “MAG alloy” wheels that people like to put on sports cars and other pimped up rides. And if we’ve got 2.5% Nb in the Zr, but only 1% of that Zr makes it into the final product, then the Nb level in the final product will be 0.025%. And 0.1% is the cut off point for Nb. Above that in the final product and we can’t use it, below that and we can safely ignore it.

Thus we can ship old Soviet nuclear alloy off to be made into car wheels. And everyone profits from this, the original owners of the scrap, we middlemen who worked out how to do this and the people making those aluminium alloys who get cheaper inputs.

The scrap metal industry is full of these sorts of little quirks and business jinks. For it is a relatively mature industry and we’ve had the time to work out how to deal with almost all of the things that we produce out of metal in the first place. But as Ozimek points out the same is not yet true of plastics:

The most important thing that Junkyard Planet gives readers is a lot of reasons to feel good about the power of markets to help deliver the most sustainable solutions. But ultimately it does not leave you with the impression that markets are enough. When it comes to plastics and some other examples Minter gives, consumers need be smarter, and yes, more ethical. While profits, markets, and innovators do more than most understand to help keep the world clean, responsible consumers can’t hope they will take care of everything.

My interpretation of this would be that the plastics industry simply isn’t as advanced as the metals one in its recycling practices. Not that I find this to be all that much of a surprise. We’ve been recycling metals for a good 3,000 years now, ever since the beginning of the Bronze Age. Plastics only really got going after WWII. And what will drive people getting better at that recycling is the discovery of useful things, profitable things, that we can do with recycled plastics and also methods of recycling them that are themselves profitable.

One thing we might note about metals recycling: we don’t do it because we’re about to run out of minerals, for we’re not. We do it because recycling is cheaper than digging up and processing new ores. That’s the other test that plastics recycling will have to pass before it becomes a widespread and mainstream activity.

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